Then at 5:00 a.m., 4:00 p.m. Washington time, Russia’s C in C of the western military theater, or TVD, Major General Agursky, received reports that brigades from West Germany’s First Armored and Second Mechanized Divisions were being diverted to reinforce the NATO semicircle of armor around Fulda Gap and that the British First Army, in position south of the Elbe, was moving farther south to shore up the areas depleted by the West Germans heading to Fulda. Agursky gave orders for the second phase of Operation Home Rule to begin.
The Soviet Ninth Armored Division, leading an attack of thirty Soviet-Warsaw Pact divisions, fifteen armored, fifteen mechanized infantry — over 450,000 troops in all — struck and broke through in the far northern sector of NATO’s front, twenty-four miles east of the Elbe, racing for Hamburg and Bremerhaven, the prime designated ports for U.S. resupply of NATO. NATO headquarters had never been sure of Denmark’s willingness to intervene against such a Russian-Warsaw Pact right hook south of Denmark’s border, and eventually NATO’s high command was proven correct, for while the West German Sixth Mechanized Division in Schleswig-Holstein attacked bravely and without hesitation, aided by elements of the eighty-four thousand First German Corps and northern elements of British First Army, the Danish Parliament debated the advisability of becoming involved. By the time they’d decided to send a stern note to Moscow, the Soviet-Warsaw Pact blitzkrieg, spearheaded by five thousand Soviet T-90s, was racing through the dawn toward the vital ports of Hamburg and Bremerhaven, the T-90s’ 135-millimeter laser-guided cannons blasting everything before them. The most strategic bridges over the Elbe were quickly in the hands of the Soviet 207th Airborne, who started a row at Soviet-WP HQ by taking all the glory for having secured the bridges when it was in fact SPETSNAZ, special force teams, already in place in the west, who had secured the bridge crossings by thwarting NATO demolition teams in the first place.
At Fulda Gap, one of the T-90 five-tank-platoon leaders was Lt. Sergei Marchenko, twenty-four, younger son of Kiril Marchenko and who, because fate had decreed that he be less than five feet six inches in height, had automatically been conscripted to the Soviet Tank Corps, the 2.10-meter-high T-90 being the lowest silhouette of any tank in the world. But what Sergei Marchenko had really wanted to do was fly. What his father wanted him to do was to obey orders so that in time, if he acquitted himself well as a tank commander, he might qualify for transfer. Right now, however, all that Marchenko was concerned about was staying alive — the inside of his T-90, devoid of the airconditioning of the American M-1s, extraordinarily hot due not only to the heat generated by the tank engine and the motors that moved the ten-ton turret but by the smoke and heat generated by the scores of other tanks in the 270-tank division moving toward the Gap. Many of the tanks were now more than fifty meters apart, violating the normal “twenty-five meter” rule of Russian armor. It was an on-the-spot decision by the corps commander to get his tanks as far from one another as possible in an effort to avoid the heavy punishment being meted out by the Thunderbolts and the legendary concentrated artillery fire of the Americans, many of whose guns, as in Fulda Gap, had long been pre-positioned to saturate grids within grids. Apart from the heat in the tank, Marchenko, after two hours of combat, found the noise of the turret grating and squeaking, the crash of the automatic loader, the high whine of electric motors, and above all the radio traffic, was so overwhelming in its disorientation, he removed his headset. It was a court-martial offense during full attack, but whoever wrote the rules in Moscow didn’t drive a tank.
Lowering his dust goggles, he stood up, one arm resting against the 12.70 machine gun, as he watched another wave of armor and armored personnel carriers barely visible forging through the dust and smoke, the whole division under orders that once they were through the Gap, they were to wheel south in an effort to engage American and German reinforcements on the Fulda front. What they needed now, thought Sergei, even more than air-conditioning, was for the Soviet MiGs to deal a death blow to the F-15s and F-16s and to clear the skies of damned American Apache helicopters that were so good at ducking down in gaps between the woods and ambushing two to three tanks at a time before they were blown out of the air. Unfortunately the Soviet Havoc helicopters at a distance could easily be mistaken for an American Apache, and some of these had reportedly been hit by mistake. Above the smoke and crash of the ground battle, over sixteen hundred NATO and Soviet-Warsaw Pact aircraft, from high-performance jets to subsonic ground-support aircraft, were engaged in a fierce battle, the NATO air force’s biggest problem being that, although they could launch over three sorties per plane in the first ten hours compared to the Russians’ two, their heat-seeking missiles had in fact taken out over thirty of their own aircraft in the high-tech confusion over Fulda Gap, where Murphy’s Law operated with even more devastating effect than in peacetime, when laser beams fixing on the wrong target simply resulted in an embarrassed pilot. In the skies over Fulda it meant the death of a pilot, and while the West could replace fighters at a faster rate than the Soviet-Warsaw Pact alliance, the Russians’ reserve of pilots had been carefully built up to a three-to-one superiority over NATO.
As Marchenko looked above him, glimpsing dogfights through the wafting smoke cover, he wondered who was getting the best of it. He wasn’t even sure what was happening in his sector, let alone what part he played in the master plan. All he knew was what any other commander, tank crewman, or infantryman knew. Their local action, no matter how small, was merely part of the master plan hatched by some genius out of the Frunze Military Academy after Gorbachev had so stupidly signed the INF, ridding NATO of all its medium-range missiles and so forcing NATO to face only two possibilities in Western Europe: either a modern conventional war now under way or all-out, long-range nuclear holocaust in which no one would be the winner.
Marchenko’s troop of five tanks had stopped for refueling when they got the message “German armor ahead.” Marchenko felt his stomach tighten — half fear, half excitement. If you beat the Germans, you’d done something. The Americans were tough, but this was German home soil. “What are they?” Marchenko asked. “M-1s or Pattons?”
“Leopards.”
“Ones or twos?”
His wingman signaled that they had finished refueling.
“What’s the difference?” asked the sergeant over the radio from the starboard tank. “A Leopard’s a Leopard.”
“Oh,” said Sergei with mocking nonchalance. “No difference. You clod. The Mark Two’s reach is an extra thousand meters. A slight advantage over the One, wouldn’t you agree?”
That was the major trouble, thought Sergei — never quite knowing what you were up against. His was only a small piece in a great puzzle of war. Now, if you were a fighter pilot — then at least you’d have more freedom of movement than in one of the nine hundred tanks now wheeling en masse to engage the West Germans, the biggest problem for the next few miles being a collision in the damn smoke.
Then news came that another lightning strike had been unleashed by Major General Agursky, this time a left hook around the Czechoslovakian-Austrian corner near the Bohemian Forest’ across the river in Inn — fanning out on the ancient Danube plain and streaming into Bavaria.
“Who told you that?” shouted Sergei.
“American armed forces network.”
Sergei smiled, despite the dust-thick air that was making it almost impossible to breathe. Why did the Americans tell everybody? He couldn’t understand it. They had to tell everyone everything. They were telling the world NATO was on the run, reeling two hundred miles to the north, the S-WP forces smashing through the Dutch 415th Armored and now two hundred miles south through the Austrian border, splitting the NATO defenses into three sectors. Clearly Agursky was set on the right course, seeking to divide the NATO pockets, then pulverize them into submission before America’s enormous production potential to resupply could come into play. And the farther the S-WP penetrated into West Germany, the less likely it became that the Americans could even consider the nuclear alternative. The radio crackled, informing Marchenko that the Leopard tanks were Mark Ones.